Sunday, November 8, 2009

We have received several generous gifts towards purchasing and transporting rice to the Isnag to help with their food shortage this year. We are blessed and encouraged to be able to help our Isnag friends in this way. It is our plan to spread the donations out throughout the year.During the last week of October, I made a translation checking trip to the village. I took the bus from Manila and when I arrived at the flight center I found the 1,300+ pounds of rice I had ordered waiting for me.

Everything is a learning process and we learned that a bag of rice it too heavy to carry around conveniently. Each sack weighed 110 pounds. So, before the next day's flight, we worked at dividing the bags into smaller sacks. Bob Hall is our supply buyer who arranged for the rice to be ready for me to take and he and Onsat did a lot of the work getting the bags ready.

The airplane can take around 650 pounds per flight, so we arranged for one extra flight the day I flew in and that the rest of the rice would fly in on the day I flew out.

The people were very thankful for the help and I had no problem finding people willing to carry it from the airstrip to the village. The rice we took in will be divided between 100+ families and each family will get around 11 pounds which will feed them for 4 or 5 days.

The translation checking part of the trip went extremely well. I did not think I could accomplish all that I had on my to-do list, but God blessed and I even got more done than I was hoping for. This was partially due to being stranded in the village for two extra day by bad weather. The following is a short video I took on the day I was hoping to fly out.

Around noon on Friday the clouds began to break to the east and we called the airplane. By the time the pilot arrived, the weather had greatly improved. We took a medical patient and her brother out with us and they traveled with me, by bus, all the way to Manila. I arrive home around midnight.